Tag Archives: jewels

Ava Gardner’s Jewels in The Cassandra Crossing

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The Cassandra Crossing (George Pan Cosmatos) is an all-star disaster film. Burt Lancaster, Sofia Loren, Ingrid Thulin, Richard Harris, Martin Sheen, O.J. Simpson and Lee Strasberg headline along with Ava Gardner, who steals the show. She comes in swathed in furs and jewels with Martin Sheen as her young gigolo, walking two steps behind her carrying her dog and her luggage. She looks her age AND divinely beautiful, and she gives a wittily ironic performance that renders all of Martin Sheen’s method intensity practically invisible when together in the frame: MGM charm school plus experience wins out over Stanislavski.

Ava plays the wife of a rich arms manufacturer travelling through Europe with her gigolo who she thinks she has under her thumb but who is using her to pass class a drugs from country to country in her vanity case. To underline the wealth of her character, as part of her self-guided mise-en-scène of her own beauty, and as an added attraction to the film, the jewels she wears are real, mainly Van Cleef and Arpels and all from her famous collection:

 

You can have fun admiring her extraordinary beauty and matching the jewels in the images below from the film to those from the book above, with images from the auction of her jewels at Sotheby’s New York in 1989:

 

José Arroyo

Cronaca di un amore/The Story of a Love Affair 2

I’ve just seen Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore, which I found wonderful. But I’ve still to process it. For the time being, I can’t get over the extraordinary beauty of Lucia Bosé in the film and the eye-popping things she’s wearing. The clothes are by Ferdinando Sarmi, whom I’ve never heard of, and probably with good reason. They’re not ‘good’ or ‘original’ designs. But they sure look arresting, expensive and beautiful on Lucia Bosé. The jewels are by Corsi whom I’ve likewise never heard of. The hats are uncredited, which is a good thing as they are ridiculous. Was it Nancy Mitford who asked why a new hat always inspired either titters or violence? Massimo Girotti is the man in the picture and Antonioni does not film him with the same love as Visconti did in Ossessione. So permit me this fan swoon, and I’ll get to the film proper in another post. Screen Shot 2018-06-11 at 19.40.13.png

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José Arroyo